os: CentOS Linux release 7.7.1908 (Core)
cpu: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz
Average time for wc on the same test file: 0.8 seconds
Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#32This doesn't seem to be comparing anything like the same thing. Does the Haskell version really do the same thing as the C version? Does it handle all of the same error cases, providing the same quality of error messages if they occur? Does it handle localization? If not, that makes the comparison very skewed, as unhammer already pointed out. Sure, if you strip out all of the things that the people who wrote wc actua…
Does it handle multiple files, and stdin? Anyway, destroying Haskell with 100 lines of C :-) https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gdevic/minix1/master/comma...
I see and raise, to one line:
https://www.ioccc.org/2019/burton/prog.c
It is the Burton entry from The International Obfuscated C Code Contest, but seems like only handling ascii
https://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html
Limits:
"Requires the C locale and ASCII character set. Input should be less than ten million octets to avoid this problem."
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#33So I just wrote the most naive version of wc I could think of in C, matching the capability of this Haskell version, and I smoked the system wc ... my code, unoptimised, was over twice as fast.
$ time wc Backups/Tera2/files.txt
1123699 2283439 161361844 Backups/Tera2/files.txt
real 0m2.010s
user 0m1.964s
sys 0m0.020s
L: 1123699
W: 2283439
C: 161361844
real 0m0.864s
user 0m0.835s
sys 0m0.028s
(See my comment elsewhere[0] for a more sensible comment)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22234673
--------
Update: I just compiled with -O3 and got user time of 0.24 secs. This version is 8 times faster than the system wc.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#34This doesn't seem to be comparing anything like the same thing. Does the Haskell version really do the same thing as the C version? Does it handle all of the same error cases, providing the same quality of error messages if they occur? Does it handle localization? If not, that makes the comparison very skewed, as unhammer already pointed out. Sure, if you strip out all of the things that the people who wrote wc actua…
> failing to note the differences is simply dishonest. Like yourself, I think any reader could understand that this is meant to be a toy implementation. The author even says so in the very first paragraph and at several points in the article thereafter. How is that dishonest?
Because that makes the programs sufficiently different that the conclusion about "smashing" seems dishonest.
Apples smash Oranges, etc.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#35The post is very insightful and well written. The title is provocative which is very common nowadays. However, there should be a "serious" section that puts things into perspective. As others have pointed out it leaves a bit of a taste otherwise.
Those are serious flaws. I think it’s misleading, not insightful at all.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#36This doesn't seem to be comparing anything like the same thing. Does the Haskell version really do the same thing as the C version? Does it handle all of the same error cases, providing the same quality of error messages if they occur? Does it handle localization? If not, that makes the comparison very skewed, as unhammer already pointed out. Sure, if you strip out all of the things that the people who wrote wc actua…
> This doesn't seem to be comparing anything like the same thing. This is a fair point, and I believe this whole series of 'Beating C with foo' posts could have been better named. But I'm of the opinion that the whole series is about showcasing various language's strengths and weaknesses, while using GNU wc as a benchmark. From this perspective, I've learnt a bit about several languages I knew nothing about, so I rat…
It's all about tone.
Everyone remembers being a brash know-nothing teenager, so just by the headline "DESTROYING C" you get that vibe.
I remember having a blog about Haskell circa 2002 where I would smugly enumerate the ways in which Guido van Rossum was wrong. "GUIDO IS WRONG! PART 4" my post titles would say.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#37> So we’ve managed to just smash a C program that was looked at by thousands of eyes of quite hardcore low-level Unix hackers over a few decades. We did this with a handful of lines of pure, mutation-less, idiomatic Haskell, achieving about 4 to 5 times of throughput of the C version and spending less than an hour on all the optimizations. I've done many very arrogant things in my life, because I've been a strange gu…
Perhaps - just possibly maybe perhaps - he was suggesting its is his superior tool and technology that allowed his team to do this. Do you think you took the most generous possible interpretation possible?
He is comparing apples and oranges and his conclusion can only be characterized as widely misleading and off the mark.
The most generous possible interpretation is to say that he's not being intentionally misleading but actually believes what he writes. I fail to see how that improves matters.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#38Ah, the weekly "I beat C using X language".
I don't understand why LOC was even brought up. You can put all your code on a single line in most languages. The Github code linked even has 26 lines of Haskell which makes this even more nonsense.
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#39I don't think it is very "hard" to "destroy" most of these programs, they were written a long time ago, they evolved with backwards compatibility or portability in mind, these can run on pretty much any system. It does seem a bit unfair to compare it to a quickly hacked together program that you test against one use case. Like the other said, the second article will probably be more interesting.
But multiple people have been working full time on wc for decades! At least, if you believe the article.
Decades yes, but who said “full time”?
Re: Destroying C with 20 lines of Haskell: wc
#40Happy 33rd anniversary of Haskell devs claiming to destroy C.